Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Making your plots interactive - update

Two years ago I have been experimenting with Shiny and interactive plots and I have published here a post that remains to be one of the most read pages of this blog. I feel guilty about it because I was wrong about almost everything. A few weeks later, the free use of shinyapps.io was over. Meanwhile, plotly package, I did not appreciate that time so much, has matured and added more R functionality.

If you are into ggplot2, it is now super-easy to add interactivity to your graph. Just take your static ggplot object pl like the following

mpg dataset

and run

library(plotly)ggplotly(pl)

That's it. You can configure your tooltip text with ggplotly(pl, tooltip = "text"), see my Rmarkdown example. And it works not only for a simple scatterplot but for more complex graphs as well, as @cpsievert tweeted today.